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commandlinefu.com is the place to record those command-line gems that you return to again and again.

Delete that bloated snippets file you've been using and share your personal repository with the world.
That way others can gain from your CLI wisdom and you from theirs too. All commands can be commented on, discussed and
voted up or down.

Stay in the loop…

Follow the Tweets.

Every new command is wrapped in a tweet and posted
to Twitter. Following the stream is a great way of staying abreast of the latest commands. For the more discerning,
there are Twitter accounts for commands that get a minimum of 3 and 10 votes - that way only the great commands get tweeted.

Manpages, command summaries, and pretty much everything else usually have the information you're most likely to want at the beginning. Seeing just the last 40 or so lines of options from a command that has 100 is not super useful, and having to scroll up each time you want to glance at something is spastic.

Run this and then do something like

p do vi --help

and you'll get the first screen(-mostly-)full of vi's usage info and options list

For the unaware, that option to aptitude search will bring up all of the packages whose descriptions contain the string "smorgasbord". Depending on your distro, there could potentially be hundreds of them.

Execute this in the root of your music library and this recurses through the directories and normalizes each folder containing mp3s as a batch. This assumes those folders hold an album each. The command "normalize-audio" may go by "normalize" on some systems.

Barely worth posting because it is so simple, but I use it literally all the time. I was always frustrated by the limitations that a non-gui environment imposes on diff'ing files. This fixes some of those limitations by colourising the output (you'll have to install colordiff, but it is just a wrapper for diff itself), using side-by-side mode for clearer presentation, and of course, the -W parameter, using tput to automatically insert you terminal width. Note that the double quotes aren't necessary if typed into terminal as-is. I included them for safety sake,

process-getopt is a wrapper around getopt(1) for bash that lets you define command line options (eg -h, --help) and descriptions through a single function call. These definitions are then used in runtime processing of command line options as well as in generating help and man pages. It also saves a little time in coding and in producing nicely formatted documentation. It is quite similar to GNU's argp in glibc for compiled languages and OptionParse for python.

It's not a big line, and it *may not* work for everybody, I guess it depends on the detail of access_log configuration in your httpd.conf. I use it as a prerotate command for logrotate in httpd section so it executes before access_log rotation, everyday at midnight.

This command creates and burns a gapless audio CD with 99 tracks. Each track is a 30 second sine wave, the first is 1 Hz, the second 2 Hz, and so on, up to 99 Hz. This is useful for testing audio systems (how low can your bass go?) and for creating the constant vibrations needed to make non-Newtonian fluids (like cornstarch and water) crawl around.

Note, this temporarily creates 500MB of .cdda files in the current directory. If you don't use the "rm" at the end of the command, you can burn more disks using